OK, so once again, I'm Ryan Brinkman, the U.S. automotive equity research analyst at JPMorgan. Very excited to get going now with our next presentation, which is from Magna International, by some accounts the third or fourth or fifth largest auto parts supplier in the world, bigger than any other one that I cover. We have Patrick McCann, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, and then Louis Tonelli, Vice President of Investor Relations. Pat and Louis, thanks so much for coming to the conference.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You know, we're starting by asking a lot of the companies some standard questions. The first one relates to the impact of tariffs, right, applicable to everyone. I'd like to know the impact on your company in particular, but also the industry overall. How do you manage the direct impact? What are your thoughts on the indirect impact in terms of the potential for demand destruction as automakers raise prices? Does it cause you to think any differently about normalized U.S. sales or North American production?
Maybe I'm not sure if this is working.
Yeah.
I'll jump in on the first one, Ryan. When you look at our tariff exposure, in May, we would have guided around $250 million. We talk about our direct exposure. This is dollars where we're the importer of record. With a bunch of the changes that have been announced, that number has come down to roughly $200 million on an annualized basis. In Q2, we incurred about $45 million. Year to date, we're about $55 million of net numbers that we've expensed. You're always working on number one, trying to make them as much USMCA compliant as you possibly can, because that way you avoid the tariff in the first place. That's a combination of working with your suppliers, working with your customers, resourcing, looking at different sources of supply, and just increasing the North American content.
Yeah, I just found an indirect impact really difficult to tell unless because the OEMs have to decide what they're going to do on price. You know, that'll have an impact on the indirect tariff impact. Our volume assumptions for 2025 at this point basically exclude any potential impact from the OEM pushing on the tariff costs to customers.
Maybe as a follow-up, I'm curious how you foresee the tariff backdrop evolving going forward. We've seen the tariff rates come down. The UK is now paying 10%, Japan 12.5%, Korea and EU 15%. Yet Canada remains at 25%. Oh Canada, how do you see that evolving? I realize your USMCA compliant parts are exempt from tariff. Would it still help you if the U.S. tariff rate on vehicles assembled in Canada were to come down, making those vehicles more competitive, perhaps because as a Canadian company, you might be still somewhat disproportionately exposed to vehicles assembled in Canada?
Yeah, it is an odd situation where you're dealing with a tariff that's higher than some of these other countries. I think the big factor is the USMCA exemption. It's really who's paying those tariffs when you look through it all is probably a much lower rate. That being said, obviously, anything attracting a tariff rate is going to drive decision making for perspective, just to level set everybody. We are a Canadian-based company, but we have $20 billion of sales in North America. About 4% of that is in Canada. Of that 4%, only about 1.2% is for Canadian production itself. All that being said, you still want to avoid tariffs. It just doesn't drive a behavior that I think is appropriate. To your point, Ryan, when you think about the way the tariffs are being enacted, we're disproportionately impacting our D3 customers, which seems odd.
When you're trying to support a U.S. manufacturing footprint and you're putting a heavier levy on Detroit-based customers, it's hard to understand. I think we're going to work through it. Like I said earlier, focusing on USMCA compliance and just resourcing and becoming efficient. All that being through with, if you would have asked me, I think we met in May, it's incredible how smoothly it's been going. There's been good communication with our customers, our suppliers, and we've been able to mitigate a large portion of our exposure.
That's great to hear. Thanks. Of course, you're right about the USMCA exemption. That's been a huge relief. However, how are you thinking about ahead to July 2026, when USMCA comes up for renewal and renegotiation potentially? What could the potential impact on Magna there be?
I wish I had a crystal ball. I'll be honest with you, that's a hard one. I don't know where it's going to go. The administration, the U.S. administration has been talking about doing a redo of it, which is odd because it was redone in the last term. We just have to focus on, and maybe it's an education program, but like the AutoPac going back to 1965 or whatever, the flow of goods between borders, it really developed the industry. It is so interconnected between this. Forget about just the OEM and the tier one, but all the way down. To pull that apart is, I think, going to be pretty difficult. We'll have to wait and see. I honestly, I can't even offer an opinion because we're just so far removed from it.
Having said that, we are in every country pretty substantially, and we'll work with our customers to mitigate the impacts as best we can.
Understandable. Thank you. You know, another question I had was about what your very latest outlook may be for vehicle electrification, including in light of some of the recent changes in the regulatory backdrop, such as the elimination of the $7,500 U.S. federal tax credit or the relaxation of the enforcement of greenhouse gas and corporate average fuel economy regulations. How has your outlook evolved? In what ways may you be running the business or allocating capital any differently as a result?
Yeah, if we go back, a couple of data points. First part of the question is, you think about our volume expectations. Everybody keeps talking about EVs. It's really a North American EV issue in my mind. When you look at China, the EV production has been strong. It's probably higher than anybody would have thought five years ago. Europe, there's been a little bit of a decline, but in the low single digits of penetration rates. It has turned into a North American issue. The issues you're referring to, Ryan, are the newer ones, like the elimination of the IRA credit. I think our big reduction in volumes we would have taken last year, we really saw the EV market start to come down in Q3, Q4 of 2023. That being said, our volume expectations were much lower than what IHS or other third-party data providers were saying.
We're going to continue to work with that. All that being said, we're still seeing some weakness back to the 7,500 when we move into 2026 and beyond. It's temporary. EVs are coming. It's just a matter of when and at what levels. We're going to continue to work with our customers to balance that transition. All that being said, we talk about our megatrends. The vast majority of our products are agnostic. 80% of our products, whether it's seats, mirrors, latching, it's the same product that goes on different vehicles. We're looking at, can you come up with a natural hedge? We have a seating contract where we supply the seats on the EV and the ICE, rather. You have a natural hedge. The car is going to sell. If you want an EV, you want an ICE.
We do that whether it's body and white and mirrors and whatnot. That's really what we've been working with our customers to try. Is it perfect? No. When you have that situation, I think that's the best outcome. The last part of the question, just coming back to the capital, a lot of the capital spend is behind us. A lot of our capital spend that we did spike up over the past three to three, four years is related specifically to battery trays. Over that period of time, that money was invested in bricks, mortars, core assets. That's behind. We're not going to have to respend that money. As the volumes come, which they will, we'll benefit from that transition. There's other little things. You're working with your customers because everybody's suffering to a certain degree. Can we share capital?
Can we come into fixed cost recoveries where we have it with our transmission programs or our STIR business, where you have a fixed cost recovery model? It takes a little risk out of the business model just generally.
Pat talked about the large portion of our business that is agnostic. The portion that isn't is our driveline business. In that area, we've been really focusing on having a building block and platform strategy where whatever the customer needs across the whole portfolio of ICE, hybrid, and EV, we can support them. If you go back to this past quarter, we announced a hybrid transmission program, a dedicated hybrid transmission program that we've been awarded. Recently, we had another hybrid driver program that we've been awarded. It just demonstrates our ability to help our customers. We have eDrive awards. We have hybrid awards. Of course, we're very strong in four-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, and transmission. We really can cover the gamut in the one area that's most impacted by electrification.
Maybe to follow up on that, while less spending on megatrends is one of the avenues of margin expansion going forward, to what extent does the deceleration in megatrends help seemingly unrelated aspects of operational improvements? I heard from a lot of companies during the chip shortage that it was just very difficult to focus on making your plant 2% more efficient when you're putting out fires every day. How do we keep the lights on, find some more chips or something? You might be less distracted with perceived need to pursue semi-transformative acquisitions in this space. What are your thoughts on the ability to get back to the nuts and bolts of execution if there's less megatrend transformation?
Stability is great. Like our industry thrives off stability. It's pumping out parts. Whether it's at a, if we go back to the chips, it was we're going to, the customer would ask for this many parts, and they'd take zero or this amount. The next day, they'd want it. It just, you can't production plan. Because you can't production plan, you can't then get your CIs to be effective. We're operating at, this year we're projecting 14.7, 14.8. It's a very low number. This is near recessionary. With that stability, what we're able to do is come in to your point and do the CIs, look at, you know, how can we automate a line? How can we put CIs? Across that board, we're expecting about 75 basis points between this year and next. With that stability, you can now do your business plans.
You can come into what part of the plant can I automate, whether it's with AMRs, whether it's with pick and place, all those really back to basics things you're talking about we can do because we're not putting out fires. You can plan. I just think it's a better environment for, you know, the supplier, obviously, but the customer, our OEMs, and even the consumer.
The next question relates to the growth of domestic Chinese automakers, how you're adapting to their rise. I had the pleasure of meeting with both of you in China in each of the last three years. Thinking back on some of those conversations, I felt like you were a little bit late to the China game. Maybe when you got there, people had already cozied up to GM and to Volkswagen with their JV partners. Maybe you had the domestic Chinese to fall back on. That has allowed you to grow a lot more quickly than others. I think at one point you said you may be the largest supplier of seating to some of the domestic Chinese, despite the fact that you might only be like the fourth largest seating supplier there. Maybe talk about how you've grown with them.
At the same time, we're adding a little bit of a nuance to the question this year of how you're leveraged to the domestic Chinese. Is there a negative to it too? I've even heard you talk about, and Frank O'Brien talk about, the manner in which they pay you on a lagged basis, and maybe not even on time. I think that they're commanding very favorable price downs and accelerated price downs up front because they know everyone is trying to lever to them. You're levered to these guys. You're levered to Xiaomi. Xiaomi doesn't like their suppliers to make any money, they told us. What was your thoughts there?
Our North American German customers say the same things, so that's fine.
Yeah, your margins made Sergio Marchionne's blood boil. Nothing new, or is there something different over there?
Yeah, we've been in China for quite a bit. Maybe it was a smaller piece. I think we have a lot of wholly owned operations in China relative to JV. Our growth was primarily via greenfield, brownfield. We have done some competitions. You mentioned the seating. We grew that business via an acquisition. Just broadly, whether it's in Canada, U.S., Mexico, Europe, we're always looking at what is a hard part to make. You never want to be competing. When we turned you, Ryan, in China, it was through a metals facility. When you go through that metals facility, you're not trying to compete with low tonnage basic parts. How do you make a cradle? How do you do hot forming? How do you do high-pressure die casting? That way, you're shrinking your competitor pool.
What we've seen at the same time is with the OEMs, they're increasing their expectations of spec. In the old days, it was a very decontented low-end vehicle, but we're seeing those specs come up. We've been able to benefit from that piece of it. We're well represented across our product categories, other than our exteriors business. That's on purpose. It's a very competitive, low margin, high investment type business. When you think about the OEMs, we've been able to provide basically a superior product. We're competitive. I'm not taking away. It is a very, very competitive place with the margins. As far as the commercial piece of it, OEMs have always paid very delayed terms. They could be up to 150 days. They pass IOUs around. They don't actually deliver cash. They'll give you a note that you can cash at a bank in six months.
That game isn't new. If you know that when you're coming in and you're quoting, it's a level expectation. What's happened in the last little bit, and there's been some push, has been the extensions of the payment terms. It's been a little bit more controlled in our basis. We're trying to focus on what, Louis, 10 customers? There's still a long, long list of customers in China. We focus on BYD, Geely, Great Wall, Chery. Those are our ones where we know what we're getting into with that relationship. They're much more sophisticated companies. Lastly, I think with the OEMs, is there a negative to it? There's a pendulum, right? At one point, they're not good. They're not a customer you want to deal with. Now everyone wants to deal with them. It's a long road.
We're dealing in a business where you're making capital decisions that last five to seven years. You have to look through that sometimes and play the long game. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. That's kind of the way we've focused our business.
To level set on in China, our sales last year were about $5.5 billion, and about 60% of it was to the domestic OEMs. It's pretty much the OEMs that Pat mentioned. I think they're a good set of customers and a pretty strong position with the growing company there.
Great, thank you. Maybe to dig in a little bit on these operational excellence initiatives that you expect to materially benefit margin. Execution seems to be improving, helped, I think, by these initiatives here. EBIT dollars and EBIT margin both rose year- over- year in the quarter just completed, despite lower sales and the impact of tariffs. It seems like you're counting on a lot more. You know, your last guidance for 2026, using the midpoints, called for a $700 million year- over- year increase in EBIT on a $2.1 billion increase in sales. That's like a 31% contribution margin. We're used to seeing suppliers like half that, kind of 15%, maybe 20% range, including Magna. Can you talk about how these various different cost drivers, sort of independent of sales, are expected to hit the bottom line?
You know, what is in the bag, do you think, for the back half and into next year versus where have you still got your work cut out on the execution front?
I'll start, maybe jump in, Louis. Your numbers are bang on, right? When you think about that sales growth at 2.1%, the only thing I would always ask people, when you look at the Magna International business, we do have a CVA business that is very significant that doesn't move margin. It's basically a fixed cost recovery model. A very important part of our business, but it's a fixed cost recovery. They're down $500 million. Our actual sales increase is closer to about 2.9%. You get back into that range. When you look at our businesses, they are distinct, our segments. I would say Power and Vision, BS, you're probably 20%- 23% incremental margin in that range. Seating, depending where you are, 12.5%- 17.5%. STIR, like I said, is probably just going to pull through at 2% margin. The incremental at 31% is probably somewhat lower.
A lot of that growth is just pure sales growth that we're seeing. Part of it is going to be related to the EV we talked about earlier. Now, all that being said, how are we driving the rest of the business? We talked about stability. It's coming into these plants and executing against that margin improvement. We were expecting, we've executed what we've done, what we've said, we've executed against it over the last two years. It's a combination of traditional CIs, just finding 2% here and there. What we've been doing is restructuring the business more quickly to a bigger extent. That benefit is coming through there as well. We also have more of the newer work where you're consolidating, not consolidating plants, but you're doing Industry 4.0, let's call it. People would have a different definition of what that is. Our world talks about automation.
What are we automating? We're automating AMRs. When you look at a facility, we had a facility, I think it had 48 tuggers and forklifts last year or 18 months ago. Today it has zero. Those are benefits when you have a part that's being zero value add, and we can take those out. How do you scale it? Magna International's benefit, I think we're third biggest, not fifth. If you look at a company that size, how do you scale it? You put it into one facility, you perfect it, and then you scale really quickly. There's that piece of it. There's pick and place. There's also logistics, whether it's inbound or outbound. All these pieces come together. That's really what's going to drive that 75 basis points that we see in 2025 and into 2026.
Yeah, 75 split roughly equal between 2025 and 2026. You mentioned in the bag. I mean, it's not in the bag, but we have detailed action plans around all the numbers that we're talking about there. We've shown our ability to execute as we have in the last couple of years, and we're going to continue to do that.
Thank you.
I'd just add too, what's interesting, we toured you in our Kazmushanghai facility. That was two years ago. That facility, this isn't just a North American European. A lot of our innovation is coming out of China. If we went back to that plant and walked around again, you would see no forklifts, no tuggers. In two years, they've all disappeared. When you were there, they were all automated, or what is it? All automated. You basically go in and you have a digital twin of the factory. You say, the operator of the machine will say, I'm going to need parts in one hour. All the AMRs go in, automatically pick and deliver parts as needed. It is accelerating, but it's a need to because of what we've been through. When you think about inflation, we're still fighting with that. Now you have tariffs.
We just need that stability we talked about earlier. Then we can start implementing these improvement plans.
Interesting. Thank you. Next, maybe you could provide us with an update on your outlook for M&A. You know, having already consummated a number of acquisitions to increase your leverage to the industry megatrends, such as the establishment of the joint venture with LG Electronics on the electrification side and the acquisition of Veoneer on the ADAS side, and with the, as mentioned, the megatrend growth now somewhat less rapid, do you expect to potentially acquire fewer companies going forward, or to focus on smaller tuck-ins, or do you continue with the M&A focus, but maybe look elsewhere than megatrends, such as your core metal forming business or something like that?
I've been at Magna for 26 years, or yeah, 26, 26 and 1/2. Most of our growth has been via greenfield, brownfield. I think we're really, really solid in that space. Just for perspective, over the last decade, we've spent about $20 billion of CapEx. That compares to about $2 billion net of M&A. We're much more focused on growing organically, and that's been our trademark. That being said, we have done some acquisitions over time. In the 26 years, I can remember two that were for $1 billion for perspective. We tend to do bolt-ons, whether we're going to get on small technology, a capital, a new customer, a new region. I think we're at a scale and size now where it's hard to grow via M&A. Just you mentioned Cosma, for example. We're already the largest metal stamper in the world. How do you grow?
Your customers don't like it. Antitrust doesn't like it. We're kind of boxed in. We're focused really on how do we return cash to shareholders at this point. We've gone through our super source of quoting, of CapEx, of the M&A. We like our portfolio. We think it's been developed over years. Now, how do we reap what we've sown? How do we give it back to the shareholders?
You mentioned $2 billion on net M&A because there have been some dispositions in there. You sold your interiors business to Grupo Antolin, your fluid pressure and controls business to Hanon Systems. I don't expect you to name names, but are there other parts of Magna International today that would be maybe more valuable to someone else? It could be ripe for sale or maybe could garner a higher earnings multiple if valued on a standalone basis because maybe their margin or growth profile is so much higher than the conglomerate, and the Magna International shareholder could benefit by still owning them, but owning them separate, having been spun out. What are your thoughts on portfolio pruning? How often do you look at this? Is there any opportunity there?
I would say we look at it regularly. We do go through our, we report out four groups. Broadly speaking, we probably have 60, 80 products, like in that range. Our operating groups are responsible for going through their own product portfolio. We do that annually. We actually just finished it in July. We'll sit down in the coming quarter, and we'll sit down with our board and say, where are we going with all these products? You mentioned interiors. Let me back up. When you think about how do we evaluate them, we're looking at what's the market like? Is it a growing market? Is it a sizable market? Question two becomes, can we make money in this market? Is it possible to make money? Then three becomes, what's your position in that market? Do we have a strong position or a weak position or a me-too position?
You go through that logic. You do that 60- 80 parts. On the big, big ones, you mentioned interiors. Interiors, big market, and it failed the test on there's money to be made. It wasn't a market that allowed margin. The second one you mentioned was the sale of fluid pressure controls. Good size market. Money was to be made. We were going to be pushed down into a me-too position of being a tier three. We exited in those cases. If you apply that logic again, when you look at where we were, first thing is where did we grow? We grew a lot in our megatrends. We were going to grow in new products with battery trays. We see ADAS content outpacing the growth in a vehicle. That's why we invested in Veoneer.
Coming to your question, when you look at the rest of our portfolio, it's well developed. I think my personal opinion, and jump in, Louis, is I think we're in the right markets. I think we have a strong position across those portfolios, whether it's regional or global. I think we're all profitable. We're making our expectations to be. I would say when you look across all of them, brutally honest, people always ask, you look at our seating operation being undersized. I like our seating business. It's a strong business. It's obviously suffered a little bit with some of the chips and all the crisis that we've been living through. I think there's a path forward there. We see it in our guidance. We're going to continue to execute. Am I going to name names? I can't, right? It's always on the whiteboard.
Maybe turning to leverage and return of capital. I know you target 1.5 times net leverage. You're a little less than 1.9 now. When do you expect to be within the target range? What are your thoughts on capital allocation when you do reach the range? I know you've shown some appetite for repurchasing your shares, even when above the range before, right? When you got maybe some line of sight toward reaching it, for example, last year when your leverage was 1.8-ish, you bought $200 million back. You did another $50 million in one Q before the tariffs. Altogether, you might have bought back like 2% while above the range there. I understand you're focused on 1.5.
Just curious if, as we continue to gain more clarity on tariffs, if the right opportunity presented itself with the share price, as it might be right now, if you had line of sight to 1.5, like November last year, you might be more flexible.
First of all, we expect to be there in 2026. We're marching down. We were at 1.87, excluding cash that we were holding to pay down debt that's coming due. You mentioned net debt. It's actually gross debt that's part of our calculation. We want to get the one to one and a half back and back and forth together.
Yeah, no, I think when you think about how we approach it, it is a difficult situation. Your numbers are bang on. We bought $250 million over the first, basically over two quarters, Q4 and Q1. We did it because we have a line of sight of where we think we're going to be. Louis mentioned 2026. You work with the credit rating agencies. This isn't done in isolation. We look at it. We have a very strong relationship with the two large rating agencies. We work through them. Our approach to capital returns hasn't changed. It's always, number one, strong foundation in your balance sheet. This is the one to one and a half. It's built to withstand a body blow. We know something's going to happen, whether it was financial crisis, COVID, chips, tariffs now.
NCIB in Canada is a strong product where you can just turn it off. You don't need to use it. We did that in COVID. We did it in the financial crisis. When you think about that, you have that in place, then we want to grow organically. We mentioned the $20 billion. We're here to grow our business at appropriate returns. We have a dividend, roughly $550 million per year. That's growing. We've grown it 14 years in a row. Our outlet is NCIB, our share repurchases. Our view is when you look at that, it's an outlet. What happened when we started buying? We bought in Q4, bought in Q1, tariffs hit. The prudent approach is, you know, we're not going to be out buying shares when tariff exposures are out there. The numbers are significant. We talked about the $200 million exposure.
We have all these pieces together. That being said, with Louis, as you get back into the 1.5, we come back in. You don't have to wait until you trick to 1.5. You can do it beforehand, as you mentioned. We're going to continue to evaluate that. We just need stability, just more macro.
We do have the flexibility because we have the NCIB currently open still in November.
I wanted to check in on your electrochromic auto-dimming mirror business, maybe particularly in China, after there were some significant developments there with one of your competitors in the second quarter. Prior to that Kazma tour, you mentioned you also led us on a tour of your electrochromic mirror plant in China. I learned on that tour that while Gentex had like upward of 90% share globally at the time, I think it's less now, that in China, their share was under 80%. You yourselves might have had 20% share and rising in China because you were willing to manufacture it in-country, whereas they were maybe fearful of some intellectual property rights, et cetera, which maybe is a concern for you too. Divided into a $40 billion enterprise, it doesn't keep you up as much at night. They're exporting everything from Michigan.
When Trump imposed the reciprocal tariffs, China retaliated with its own 100%+ tariffs. The exports ground to a halt. They took 10% of the revenue out of their guidance for the year, saying China just goes to zero. Now there's a trade truce, and it's come back, and it's back in the forecast. There was a lot of havoc there for a period of time. I was just thinking if you might have been able to make hay while the sun is shining, what is your share now? What happened during that period of time? What were discussions with customers? Might you continue to benefit even if we do have, there's another 90-day pause today on the reciprocal tariffs? With China, even if, I mean, there's the potential that the tariffs could come back. Automakers are going to be thinking about that when they source electrochromic auto-dimming mirrors in China.
What's happening there?
Yeah, the tariff noise has definitely made the OEMs investigate alternative solutions for sure. There's an interest in local sourcing because there's more capacity, and there's more capability there. We have recently installed capacity, as you mentioned. We have been a beneficiary of that across a few of our product areas, inside mirrors and DMS being two. We do expect to get to closer to 30% in the next couple of years and growing from there. We're definitely benefiting from that overall shift that we've seen.
I've got more questions for these guys. Are there any in the audience? One over here, please. A microphone coming.
Hi, thanks. Hey guys. Just a question on Ford's announcement yesterday. I mean, it's pretty recent news. When you look at how they're manufacturing that vehicle and some of the castings there, to the extent the market goes greater in that direction, what do you see in broadly? How are you positioned? How does it impact Magna?
Yeah, I can start. Go ahead. I think when you, I haven't seen their architecture. I'm just going to talk more broadly with what our castings capabilities are. We have roughly 45 high-pressure die casting mold machines globally, and we're represented in North America, Europe, and in China with those machines. Generally, we'd be operating like roughly a 4,000-ton machine. With a 4,000-ton machine, you're injecting rails, like big parts, big, big parts. There has been a push to move up into high gig castings and whatnot. Our focus has been where the market, back to the original, how we evaluate the market is we can make rails. We can make shock towers. We can do full cradles. I think our biggest shot is 23 kilos for perspective. We do very complex parts.
We're well represented, like I said earlier, on regions, but also with various customers in each of those markets.
Is that OK?
Yeah.
I wanted to ask on your relationship with Waymo. First of all, you invested $100 million in them pre-pandemic. What has that carried out on your balance sheet today? From a commercial perspective, what kind of assembly fee? I mean, this is very de minimis, right? There's only like 1,000 or 1,300 of these Waymos, I think, running around. They're doing a million rides a month now. There's a lot of excitement around them, as well as Tesla Robotaxi. I'm just curious what your ongoing relationship looks like and how you expect it to evolve going forward.
As far as the investment, it basically balances around between around $100. It's held in Canada, so there's some foreign exchange noise, but it's basically held at book as it continues to be the fair value, so in that range. As far as what we do with Waymo, I can talk about that.
Yeah.
What we do with Waymo is we received the vehicle. We just opened a new facility in Arizona.
Phoenix?
Oh, yeah.
What we do is we actually upfit the vehicle with all the sensors. It is done by our STIR operation. They obviously have a lot of expertise upfitting cars. To your point, it's been pretty low volume. That being said, when you look at where they want to go with that projection, we actually had to move facilities into a bigger facility in the Arizona state just for the volume that we expect to come through.
You kind of do have STIR on all three major regions now.
There's no painting, there's no seats.
250,000 units. It's like 20,000 or something. What is that capacity?
No, it'd be more than that. It's a different operation. If you, I'm not sure if you had a chance to go to our STIR op, it's an OEM facility, effectively.
It's a complete vehicle.
It's complete.
You go retrofitting more.
You basically take a, we used to take the Jaguar I-Pace. You take the car, and all you do is you put all the sensors onto it.
Whereas you actually make the Jaguar I-Pace.
We make our own. In Europe, we would put it through a press shop, a body shop, paint assembly, and testing.
Is Magna the reason why they use the Jaguar I-Pace?
I don't know.
Start in on it.
I don't know.
OK. Maybe an update generally, we're running out of time, but an update on the complete vehicle assembly business. Last I checked in with you, some of the sales of the vehicles that you assemble in China, Arcfox, for example, were starting to do better. I'm curious about Graz. Actually, I heard from the CFO of Xiaomi that he toured your facility. There's some interest in these Chinese automakers that are facing tariffs now of, you know, what do they do? It takes a long time to build an assembly plant. It doesn't take you as much time to spool up. Is there any opportunity there? What other opportunities would you say might be out there, given that post INEOS and Fisker, you do seem to have some excess capacity. What's your confidence you can get that soaked up?
Yeah, I think with China, you mentioned the China op. We have a joint venture in China with Arcfox JV. We produce the Arcfox. We have four models in there. The volumes are actually quite well. They've been increasing. The increase probably started about 15 months ago. It's been a pretty steady state at that point, where it's further growth. It's been operating well. Graz is our traditional business. Xiaomi toured the place. I bet you every OEM's toured this facility because it's not a facility. What we sell at Graz is obviously quality, but it's speed to market. What we do is low volume, niche type production. The flexibility is amazing. If you're a Chinese customer or you're a whatever type of customer, you want to have a quick launch into a region. You want high quality. You want flexibility.
You don't want to build a whole facility because they're expensive. How do you have that flexibility? At one point, we were producing the X5, BMW Z4, Toyota Supra, Jaguar E-Pace, Jaguar I-Pace, and the G-Wagon. One facility, one paint line, three assembly lines. That's what we sell. It's pretty normal to have people touring the place because it is best in class. It was just awarded the best in class BMW production globally. People want to tour it for a reason. When you come full circle to what are we going to do with that volume, it's high quality. It's the best in the world. Let us peak shave. Let us work with your customers to roll out what's been really four-wheel drive systems, right-hand drives, all those types of things that we can fill it. We're going to run about 75,000 units this year.
Our pinch point is the paint line, which is about 150,000. It goes up and down. We've cycled through it. We're just going to continue pushing.
We are talking to customers about additional business in there.
OK, very good. We are over time. Please join me.